Mittens, Holidays and Organization

Happy new year, y’all. How’s the year treating you so far?

{My brother, Jeremy, making honey walnut wheat bread.}

I’ve had any number of blog posts appear and disappear out of my head in the last few days. Mostly they disappear into the mashed potatoes that seem to be clogging up my head (hey Mom, you know that cold you had?). But basically, what I want to talk about boils down to three things: (1) mittens, (2) food prep and (3) family holidays. Not necessarily in that order.

{Lovely misty freezing weather in Iowa.}

Let’s start with the mittens though. I can’t seem to finish them. I’ll have you know I worked on an awesome traveling blog post about making mittens, only to find I wasn’t too pleased with what I was doing. Then I never seemed to have the time to sit down and work on them again, and finish. So here I am! Still mitten-less! This chaps my hide, if you’ll pardon the expression. I PROMISED MYSELF HANDMADE FUZZY MITTENS, and here I am still NOT with the mittens. Finishing them is my real goal for the week. Before it gets too warm to wear them.

{Jeremy’s bread, which I just finished off tonight along with my mom’s cranberry bread yesterday.}

Let’s move on to family holidays. I did what I’ve done many times in my life, and went to Iowa to my grandparents’ house. I love this ritual, and it’s something I remember doing for most of my life. It is a far drive, and I sacrifice other things to do it, but it is a dear and important tradition to me. This is usually the only time I see my maternal extended family during the year, so I make an effort to make the trip each year. I wish I could kick the a** of my paternal family to do the same periodic gathering sort of thing.

{It turns out my mom’s good at un-knotting tangled skeins of yarn. Thanks for those tangles, Wesley!}

On a side note, I got lots of great stuff. You? I gave almost 100% handmade things. It was definitely the season of felted pins. I did not make stuff, however. I will probably do something masochistic like that in the future (like some other crafty bloggers I know), but not this year. Once again, I failed to send holiday cards also. Meh. One day. Maybe I could send Memorial Day cards? Halloween?

{Denmark cemetery. You know, the old kind of town cemetery, dating to the 1800s, behind the church in the small town.}

This year I was in charge of the holiday food. Nine people from Tuesday to Saturday. Granted, I love to cook, and I don’t mind cooking a lot, but I’m used to cooking for two. This required meal planning. I love me some planning! I had charts, and I had lists, and I had recipes and I had … well, let me just show you:

See what I mean? I put notes and stuff on Flickr, too.

{I didn’t remember to get french fried onions for the green bean casserole, so I layered stuffing over the casserole instead, and it actually turned out pretty well.}

I was happy to have my grandmother (who is 83) sit while I did the work this year. She’s not good at just relaxing, but we tried. There isn’t a whole heck of a lot I can do for her being so far away, so it was good to do. Everyone else helped me out, and we all got fed on a regular basis. Usually my uncle Dan or my aunt Miriam do the cooking, but there’s no reason for me to sit around like a fence post. Uncle Dan helped with the meat a lot, which isn’t really my thing anymore.

{The day after Christmas it snowed. A lot. And Jeff drove on this to get us from Iowa to mid-Missouri. Good times! Actually, the glare from the windshield makes it look extra bad.}

The whole holiday was nice. Crazy family, crazy drive … oh hey. Did I mention there was a snowstorm on the way back to Texas? Jeff drove. I crocheted mittens. My mom got bored. It took two and a half days, but we made it in one piece. And THAT, my friends, is the mitten story. But it’s not today’s story.

Happy Side Dishes Day

I always did like the side dishes better. Potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberries. These are a lot of my favorite things. I wouldn’t want them all the time, but if you’re going to do it, do it big, right? Maybe that’s just me.

So Jeff took pictures of me periodically from about 1 pm when I started until about 6:30 when it ended. Yes. I cooked for 5.5 hours. And it was SO MUCH FUN. This was about 2 pm when I was chopping butternut squash.

It was a Food Network meal. I made Emerilized Green Bean Casserole (the kind where you use fresh green beans from Jennifer’s garden) and make your own french onions and wild mushroom mushroom soup. Except I used Alton’s baked onion rings from his casserole instead of Emeril’s fried ones.  This is me about 3:30 chopping the last of the veggies – garlic. The squash had finished roasting.

Then I made Roasted Butternut Squah & Maple Soup, also from Emeril, with tarragon oil – fabulous, by the way. Plus I made Michael Chiarello’s Definitive Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes, which are TOTALLY OMG AWESOME. I also made a Celebration Roast (veggie roast) with butternut squash, mushroom and apple stuffing, which I think is better than tofurkey. Oh, and gravy! This was around 5 pm and the food prep was done and things were cooking. Jennifer was pureeing garlic for the potatoes. I had gained an apron. This was Intense Cooking Time.

Did I mention there are two pies? Oh dear, I don’t know how I’m going to eat them. I’m writing this in a lull between food eating and pie. The goal is to stay awake. Seriously. You know what I mean. Don’t lie. This is about 5:30 pm, and Jennifer and I are surprised here by Jeff. The soups are done, the potatoes cooked, the green beans blanched. I’ve used four dutch ovens to cook dinner and 7 bowls, and 3 saucepans, not to mention two baking dishes.

The day was not without injury. I sliced off a bit of my left index finger and grabbed a hot pan. Burns are normal for me, but slicing not so much. Luckily, the finger slice didn’t hurt. I lost feeling in my thumb and first two fingers of my left hand when I had spinal surgery, so it just bled and I went on. You see Wesley is interested in what’s going on. This is around 6:30 pm. There are things in the oven now, and everything’s nearly complete. This is me and MIL in her kitchen.

7 pm. Wrapping up, cleaning up. I’m cooking the garlic puree to put in the potatoes. The soup’s warming. The green bean casserole’s cooking.  The herbs that have been in the foreground all day are finally in the pots. The baked onions are out on the right.

FINALLY DINNER. TASTY.

Hope y’all had a lovely, food-stuffed time with your loved ones. TTFN. I’m going to go have pie.

Cooking with Canning

I mentioned in my last post that I’d finished up using almost everything I canned last summer (just in time for this summer). I used my few cans of tomatoes, my salsa, my peaches very sparingly since I had so few.  It was a lot of work just to make a shelf’s worth of canned goods, so the fruits (haha!) of my labor were parceled out to worthy projects:  a warm pot of chili just as winter started, a small and rich batch of tomato sauce a couple of weeks ago, a peach crumble, some peach ice cream.

When I cook something I canned, I use all my special ingredients – usually things I get specially from other places, like my Dad’s basil and oregano.  I use rosemary and bay leaves from my mother-in-law. These things teach me about the importance of ingredients, when you see it grow or put the work in to preserve the food. I learned long ago, from I don’t know who, to not waste food. I scrape bowls when I cook. I keep my leftovers. I learned to use up my food in the order in which it goes bad.  I’ve never been wealthy, so I guess I learned a lot from watching my pennies at the grocery also.

Farmer’s markets are great, and I will always go to them, but really, it is my dearest wish to have garden. With lots of sun. And lots of stuff I eat. My backyard has now decided to add 2 kinds of purple flowers and some weird bush to its usual crop of rocks and trees, but it leaves much to be desired. And it’s not my house, so I just can’t bring myself to fix it up really nice when I know it’s a temporary arrangement.

Jeff’s mom has mentioned her garden will be growing asparagus, tomatoes, carrots, green beans, radishes, black beans, okra, thyme, dill, basil, thornless blackberries, elephant garlic, eggplant, onion and garlic chives, bunching onions, 1015 onions, butternut squash, acorn squash, bell pepper and cayenne pepper.  I copied that from her email to me.  I hope she knows I’m raiding her garden. I think she planted some of it because she knows I like it.

Apart from cooking and clearing my stores, I got a bug to make jewelry the other day. It was an exhausting day of work, and I was frustrated, and I am not a calm and patient sort of a person. I get anxious and tend to, um, get overexcited about things. I am somewhat … opinionated, I guess you could say. And when I get particularly overwrought, I end up at the craft store, whatever’s closest. Last week I ended up at Hobby Lobby looking at findings and fabric stiffener.  This being a brand new craft, I’ve been teaching myself about what happens when copious amounts of felt glue are applied to fabric and beads. This could get messy.

Hope you’ve all had a fun week. I’m going to do a fair imitation of posting twice this week. Watch out!